It was a pleasure to work with you, as you and your team made this process a more pleasant experience for our team and the participants.
Karen Perry
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT shared "early strategic elements" of a draft 10-year roadmap for achieving an interoperable health IT infrastructure, Health Data Management reports (Slabodkin, Health Data Management, 10/16).
In June, ONC released a paper outlining health IT interoperability goals the agency hopes to achieve over a three-, six- and 10-year time period (iHealthBeat, 6/5).
The agency plans to release a final version of its 10-year national interoperability plan by the spring (Conn, Modern Healthcare, 10/15).
The updated draft roadmap was presented at a joint meeting of the Health IT Policy and Standards committees by ONC's Interoperability and Exchange Portfolio Manager Erica Galvez.
During the meeting, Galvez said ONC has adopted the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers definition of interoperability, which calls for a system or product to work with other systems or products without special effort on the consumer's end.
She said that the draft report, which will be available for public comment in January 2015, takes an incremental approach to achieving interoperability (Health Data Management, 10/16). The draft report states:
According to the draft report, ONC will create and launch a program that monitors who complies with the voluntary national framework (Bowman, FierceHealthIT, 10/14).
During her presentation, Galvez also touted the nation's existing interoperable system, noting, "There is a base from which we can build. We're not starting from zero."
For example, she noted that health care organizations have increased the number of directed exchange transactions through health information exchanges by 225% to more than 226.6 million transactions between the second quarter of 2012 and the fourth quarter of 2014 (Modern Healthcare, 10/16).
Overall, committee members generally agreed with the draft roadmap (Gold, PoliticoPro, 10/15).
In addition, the Health IT Now Coalition in a statement applauded ONC for a plan that "immediately challenges the status quo to think beyond pecuniary interests to transforming health care." Health IT Now Coalition Executive Director Joel White said the Policy and Standards committees must "step up," take charge and demand better outcomes for consumers (Health Data Management, 10/16).
Also on Wednesday, the Policy and Standards committees formally approved a set of six recommendations from the JASON task force that calls on CMS to focus efforts on public application programming interfaces, Clinical Innovation & Technology reports (Pedulli, Clinical Innovation & Technology, 10/16).
The JASON task force was created as a short-term joint workgroup under the Policy and Standards committees to analyze and synthesize feedback on a previously released JASON report, which was prepared by an independent group of scientists that advises the federal government on issues pertaining to science and technology (iHealthBeat, 9/4).
In a final report, the JASON task force recommended using Stage 3 of the meaningful use program as a "pivot point" to begin the transition to public APIs (Durben Hirsch, FierceEMR, 10/14).
Under the 2009 federal economic stimulus package, health care providers who demonstrate meaningful use of EHR systems can qualify for Medicaid and Medicare incentive payments.
Specifically, the committees approved recommendations to:
According to Healthcare Informatics, the committee members did not approve language that would encourage CMS and ONC to delay or stagger Stage 3 of the meaningful use program (Raths, Healthcare Informatics, 10/15).
The Policy and Standards committees will draft a letter to ONC and CMS formally endorsing the task force's recommendations (Clinical Innovation & Technology, 10/16).
It was a pleasure to work with you, as you and your team made this process a more pleasant experience for our team and the participants.
I just want to tell you that I value people relations more than money. I remember how you were friendly and helpful not going against policies and contractual obligations at the same time, not using your power to make us feel stupid and small. It was a very rare and big experience for me. Really. I will always remember this.
The Usability People are all individuals that you can become friends with very easily. They have a lot of different interests and are a pleasure to work with. I was writing a PRD/MRD for a billing solution and worked with The Usability People in defining the user interface. They are receptive to ideas and are able to mold the user interface from an end-user's perspective. I really liked the idea of putting end-user photograph & short biography around the office to help understand the users